Ralph Nader's Skeleton Closet

Ralph Nader has done a lot of good for consumers. He has also led attacks on such evils
as Volkswagen cars, the American Automobile Association, whole milk, colored toilet paper, fluoridated water,
and the Elvis stamp. Through it all he has manipulated the press brilliantly and built himself a comfortable
and powerful niche without need for election, even within his own consumer groups.

4 years after he unquestionably tipped the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, Nader refuses to admit that
or take any kind of responsibility, and he's planning to run again. This time though even the Green party is getting
sick of him.

For 30 years, Ralph Nader has proclaimed himself to be "Saint Ralph", the only honest
man in Washington, and the only friend of the average citizen. If that doesn't make you
puke already, then click on the allegation of your choice:

"[Nader] doesn't want to be a Green, he runs with his coterie rather than party organizers, he doesn't
involve local Green leaders and he doesn't get the racial issue. I fear if Nader runs, he'll drag down every
other Green in this country." -- John Rensenbrink, editor of "Green Horizon Quarterly"

"Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a
big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes." -- Dave Barry

"If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years." -- Ralph Nader in 1977

"[Nader running for president again is] an ego-centered exercise in futility. [Until the Green Party wins more local elections],
wasting its time in races that are unwinnable only detracts from its message, its long-term goals and
current accomplishments." --Larry Barnett, Green Party member and former mayor of Sonoma, California

"We spent a hundred years trying to clean sweatshops out of our system and what happens? Along comes the
first major reformer of any impact, and he starts doing the same goddamned thing. ... My wife had to tell Ralph
once to stop phoning after midnight." -- Jim Turner, former Nader lieutenant

"He [Nader] is, I believe, an authoritarian, a man on a white horse,
and I for one, hope that he will never ride into the White House." -- David Sanford, Nader's former editor, 1976

Jay Leno: "What do you do for fun?" Nader: "Strawberries" -- The Tonight Show

"Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect." -- Ralph Nader

Nader wraps himself in the mantle of "public interest" with a personally ascetic style
and a focus on structural or "apple pie" issues -- consumer safety, corporate accountability,
"citizen power" -- rather than traditional partisan issues. He opposes not
conservatives, but arrogant corporate leaders who amass money through public tax breaks,
deny any democratic input or inquiry, and viciously attack anyone who challenges them.
It's a brilliant strategy.

"Nader is as ravenous as a Nixon or a Kennedy, and the abstract principles he espouses
he does not live by." -- Charles McCarry, "Citizen Nader"

Ralph's image is built on the idea that he is somehow pure, not motivated by power,
fame or money like those nasty politicians. But he is in fact just another
Washington lawyer and lifelong Beltway pol who has built a powerful organization,
lobbies Congress, raises millions through direct mail and $1,000 a plate
dinners, gets paid tens of thousands by interest groups for his speeches,
manipulates the press and overworks a lot of earnest young staffers.

Even his presidential ambitions are old news. He claims to be running
just to send a message, but Nader also ran for president in 1992
(running a write-in campaign in the New Hampshire primary, with little success).
As far back as 1976, his media supporters (including Nicholas Van
Hoffman and Mary McGrory) were plugging a draft Nader movement in their columns.

It's fine for him to want power, fame and even money -- everyone else in Washington
does -- but he ought to cut the holier-than-thou crap and take responsibility for
his ambitions.

No one doubts that Ross Perot -- who spent $60 million out of pocket
on his last campaign -- has huge personal ambitions, whatever
good he may accomplish as a candidate. Why should we think more of Ralph Nader, who has
built a career flush with power, fame and money out of nothing else but his political
actions in Washington?

Nader is no better and no different than Jerry Falwell or Ralph Reed -- nimble but unelected
politicians who've made successful careers as self-appointed moralists.

Saint Ralph loves to preach about democracy and "citizen power", but he runs
his carefully concealed empire with an iron grip. Of 19 groups associated with Nader, the most powerful and
important groups are all directly
controlled by Nader or completely under his influence and no one else's. With some groups, Nader is the only
contributor; others are controlled
by his sister, Laura Nader Milleron, or his cousin.

And there is nothing democratic about Nader's groups -- citizens have no power at all. Of 19 groups in Nader's
network, only one relatively minor one
is a membership organization, which would allow individuals to vote and challenge the decisions of the small elite
running them. The groups' managers
operate in strict secrecy, releasing the absolute legal minimum of information, and
sometimes not even that. And when Nader IS
challenged, he gets vindictive and often attacks his questioner.

Beyond the hypocrisy, this authoritarian streak is very dangerous in a potential president -- presidents have
tremendous power, and the most important check
on it is simply their personal honor and unwillingness to abuse power. Nader has never shown these traits, much
less an ability to make tough decisions
that are fair to his enemies. Of course, he hasn't had much power to abuse -- yet. Anyone considering voting for
him should think twice -- or three times -- about that.

The Nader myth is built in large part of stories of his personal asceticism -- such as taking a minuscule salary,
not owning
a car (he bums lots of rides), and living (through the 1970s at least) in a boarding house with a bathroom down
the hall. He claims to live on $5,000 a year and give nearly all the rest to his organizations.

Back in 1996, we noted that Nader had long earned hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in speaking fees -- over $250,000 annually
even in the mid-1970s -- played the stock market and carefully avoided making details of his finances public, even as he demanded that
various corporations and other politicans reveal their money dealings.

He has steadfastly refused to make his tax returns public (as Dole and Clinton have done). In 1996 he even says he
spent less than
$5,000 on his campaign so that he wasn't required to file even the minimal financial disclosure forms every
other candidate is
filing.

This time he had to admit spend more than $5,000, and his financial disclosure -- while sketchy -- revealed that he is a multimillionaire
who makes hundreds of thousands on speeches each year and owns over $1 million in Cisco stock alone. (Nader still refused to release
his tax returns, though all other major candidates have done so for the last many years.)

His lifestyle claims are bullpucky in other ways, too. His speaking gigs often include first class hotels and
and meals, even limousines, and the many organizations he controls -- that's where his tax-deductible contributions go -- have many ways to
cover his expenses as well. Plus, there is considerable evidence that he does own and stay in one or more houses. He acknowledges spending
considerable time at a "family house" in Connecticut, and he appears to own a townhouse in Washington.

David Sanford of the New Republic documented that residents of a
posh neighborhood in Washington -- on Bancroft Place NW -- often spotted him sneaking into an expensive
house there. Some
investigation showed that Nader's brother purchased the house -- worth $100,000 even back in
1972 -- though he was an
underemployed educational "consultant" and had no education beyond high school. Nader issued a statement
"that he does not live in his
brother's Bancroft Place house", but when a now-former worker (Lowell Dodge) asked him privately, he wouldn't
deny it.

When the Washington Post's then-society columnist Maxine Cheshire asked Nader about the reports, he knew
every detail of the house's financing and couldn't resist
rhapsodizing about what a great tax break buying a house was. "He talks about that real estate investment the
way some men talk about sex. He's
so excited about the whole idea of tax write-offs and all that. I mean, did I realize that that's the greatest
investment you can make, the
biggest tax advantage, bla bla bla bla bla bla."

Nader always received lots of funding from trials lawyers, and in return has supported their interests throughout
his career.
For all his talk of democracy, Nader's vision is of an elite of lawyers -- led of course by himself -- defending the
little guy, much more than true "citizen power".
He confided to Charles McCarry his dream of having 4,000 to 5,000 "professionals" around the country to battle
business nationwide.

Ralph talks big about democracy and even unions. But when his own workers at one of his magazines, Multinational Monitor, got fed up with cruel working conditions and started agitating for a union of their own, Nader
busted the union with all of the hardball techniques used by corporate owners across America. Workers at Public Citizen, another Nader group, also
tried to form a union because of 60 to 80 hour work weeks, salaries that ranged from $13,000 down, and other difficult working conditions and were blocked by
Nader, who remains unapologetic to this day.

Nader says "I don't think there is a role for unions in small nonprofit 'cause' organizations any more
than ... within a monastery or within a union."

When ringleader Tim Shorrock filed the union recognition papers, Nader immediately transferred ownership in the Multinational Monitor
to close friends who ran an organization ("Essential Information") that Nader had set up. When Shorrock showed up for work the next day,
he had been fired, the locks were changed, and management called the police to charge him with theft (of his own work papers.) That charge was
thrown out of court, but management fired the two supportive editors and sued the three of them for $1.2 million, agreeing to drop the intimidation suit only when they
dropped their NLRB complaint. All of these action are straight from the hardball anti-union playbook, and Nader makes no apology.

According to Nader, "Public interest groups are like crusades…you can’t have work rules, or 9 to 5." Shorrock, with his "union ploy," became an "adversary" according to Nader. "Anything that is commercial, is unionizable,"
but small public interest organizations "would go broke in a month," Nader says, if they paid union wages, offered union benefits and operated according to standard work rules, such as the eight-hour day. Remember that Nader's well-funded
organizations were amassing tons of extra money that Ralph has been playing the stock market with during all these events.

"How can we go out and try to save the world from people when we're grinding people to death all the time?"--
John Esposito, original staffer at Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law

"Nader strikes me as conforming to the stereotype people have of sociologists and politicians: they bleed for the
poor and downtrodden but mistreat their maids." -- David Sanford

Like many Washington politicians, Ralph Nader's groups have long taken advantage of earnest young ambitious
workers, with two differences; Nader was more controlling and paid far less. In 1976, many were
paid $5,000 per year and only a few at the top made as much as $20,000. (Nader's organizations refuse to
release information on what they pay workers.) Meanwhile, Nader required daily logs of everything
the workers did from 7am to 9pm, plus monthly summaries of these logs. If you didn't turn in your logs, you
didn't get paid.

Nader often called workers after midnight or on sunny weekend days, with instructions, or just to test their
willingness to work hard.
When a revolt over working conditions broke out in the Congress Project and students demanded a group session
with Nader, he contemptuously scheduled a meeting at 7:00 am, believing that few would show up.

9 marriages of staffers broke up under the pressure, including John and Nancy Esposito's, Mark Green's, Sid
Wolfe's, and Davitt McAteer's.

Unlike almost every other nonprofit organization, Nader's various groups often amass a nontaxable profit of
several hundred thousand dollars per year, and have rapidly build up impressive net worth's -- which
Ralph refuses to reveal in his annual reports. (His lame reply is that people who are interested can get the
information by getting every year's annual report and doing the math. So much for openness.)

The book "Abuse of Trust" carefully documents the money amassed and stocks played for 6 major groups,
including Public
Citizen, Inc. and the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, his two largest groups. Public Citizen, Inc., in
particular, amassed money so quickly that it bought an old FBI building for $1.25 million IN CASH in 1980,
only its eighth year of existence.

One reason he may hide his ample cash reserves -- besides the fact that people may not want to give him more
money -- is that he is fond of playing the stock market with that green. (He also uses surpluses from
his most flush organizations, usually the tax deductible ones, to give grants to his other groups.) Some of these
transactions appear reckless for a nonprofit, "public interest" group; others skirt the edges of insider trading and
conflict of interest.
Mostly, it seems that all this money was a toy that Nader enjoyed playing with, especially as his winnings
increased his power, fame and influence.

For example, the Nader is the president and treasurer of the Public Safety Research Institute. In 1970 alone,
PSRI traded on the stock market 67 times, buying and selling $750,000 worth of stock, though the organization
only had $150,000 worth of assets.
These trades included a number of short sales, high risk and tricky transactions. Some worked, some lost money.
In later years, PSRI traded less, for a good reason -- the IRS audited them after 1970 and charged the
organization with "churning", excessive
stock trades whose risk threatens the charitable purposes of the organization. It paid
a fine and did not contest the charge. Thereafter, PSRI continued to play the market with fewer, generally long
positions. Likewise, the Safety Systems Foundation (SSF) -- run by Nader's sister, and entirely funded by him
personally -- engaged in a number of
stock and bond transactions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was also fined by the IRS and paid without
contest.

Several of these trades were poised to take advantage of Nader's activities, by selling short the stock of
companies Nader's groups attacked, or buying stock of their competitors. In 1973, PSRI bought stock in Allied
Chemical, the primary manufacturer of
airbags, on the very day before GM announced they would offer optional airbags on 1974 models. PSRI made a
12.5% profit in 3 and a half months. In 1976, PSRI and the SSF bought stock in Goodyear just as the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration --
then run by former top Nader aide Joan Claybrook -- announced an investigation of the Firestone 500 series of
steel-belted radials. The 2 organizations held onto the stock for 2 years until there was a recall, and Firestone --
Goodyear's major competitor -- suffered.

In 1970, IT&T attempted to merge with the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. Nader filed a 50 page brief
attacking the merger, then SSF sold IT&T stock short. It made almost 10% on its money in 6 DAYS, then closed
its position two days before the merger was
approved. When pressed by a reporter, Nader said the timing was "mere coincidence" and said he had no control
over the investment. However, his sister Laura Nader Millerson was the sole trustee of SSF throughout its
existence, and Nader was the sole contributor.

Ralph exhibits a driven secrecy and paranoia reminiscent of no one so much as Richard Nixon, his old enemy.
The man who said "information is the currency of democracy; its denial
must always be suspect" routinely refuses to release even basic information about himself or his organizations.
Granted, he has enemies,
but this trait goes back to when no one knew of him. In the mid-1960s, before "Unsafe At Any Speed" made him
famous, Nader wrote for the New
Republic Magazine and often gave the secretary there a false name (Mr. Wilson) when he called or visited. Even
then, he made some of his phone calls in whispers or in code to thwart
possible wiretappers.

Another Nixonian trait of Nader's is a tendency to cover-up. When pressed or challenged, he has lied, shunted
responsibility onto his staff members, made them reconstruct documents, hidden his control over his own
organizations,
attacked the press or critics involved, or simply refused to release information with lame excuses.

There are many examples:
-- Ralph refuses to release his tax returns (as Clinton and Dole have)
-- He even says he will spend less than $5,000 in this presidential campaign so he won't have to file the minimal
financial disclosure all other candidates
have filed.
-- Two of his top aides even refused to give the address of Nader's office to two Congressman who requested it at
a Congressional Hearing.
-- His main group, Public Citizen, has actively fought disclosure laws that would inform the public of the role
that special interest groups -- such as
his -- play in lobbying on legislation. (e.g. H.R. 81 in the 96th Congress)
-- Public Citizen refused to give information to the Better Business Bureau or the similar NIB when
requested.
-- He runs a network of organizations, which he claims are independent -- but his brother, sister and cousins hold
major leadership positions with several, Nader heads advisory boards for others, and he is the only or major
financial donor to 3 groups. Many other groups are funded in whole or in part by other groups in the network
that Ralph does directly control.
-- Ralph even incorporated one of his groups -- the Public Safety Research Institute -- in Delaware, because of its
notoriously lax corporate laws,
-- As of 1982, his groups disregarded the charitable solicitation laws of 25 by not filing legally required
registrations. At least 1 state (New York) had to pursue
Public Citizen, Inc. and the Center for the Study of Responsive Law (Nader's 2 biggest groups) legally to try and
force them to obey the law.
-- After the first attacks on him for being owned by trial lawyers, he distorted facts, attacked the press and forced
am employee to create a false history to
cover up the scandal. The employee, Lowell Dodge, later fell out with Nader and revealed this cover-up.

Another authoritarian trait of Nader's is his inability to tolerate any criticism. Journalists who
question his excesses are inevitably accused of personal vendettas, or being tools of industry.

Politicians get worse: Nader called one Congressman who opposed the Consumer Protection Act "a disgustingly
repulsive, slimy double-crosser."
He called another a "pathological liar" and a "corrupt, lying anti-people crook." His crime? Opposing a bill
to mandate air bags. Nader went on to say that people who opposed mandatory airbags were the kind that would
"sell thalidomide to pregnant women."

Even his own workers face Ralph's wrath for leaving after years of grueling, underpaid and loyal work.
James Fallows, author of a recent book critiquing the media, worked for Nader at the start of his career. He
wrote:
"I think you won't find many people who have had a pleasant parting with Ralph. It's usually pretty ugly when
the separation comes,
and I think it's largely that by leaving you seem to make a choice... a 'if you're not with us you're against us' sort
of thing."

Penn State's Board of Overseers declined Nader's PIRG group's coercive funding and
voted instead
to let students check a box to make a donation (like presidential campaign funding on 1040 tax forms) -- a
perfectly reasonable compromise.
Nader blasted this plan as a "sabotage technique" and "tyranny 1776 style," and then announced an investigation
of the school's trustees for "conflicts of interest."

College PIRG groups, which Nader founded and leads despite his denials of
control, use an astonishingly undemocratic, even coercive funding mechanism that Ralph designed.
Once a college approves, all students are automatically billed a few dollars out of their student
fees to support the local PIRG. To avoid paying, students must make a special trip to the
Registrar and fill out a form so they can get their $2-6 back.

Most don't of course, out of inertia or because they aren't even aware they're funding Ralph. That's
why record and book clubs use the same mechanism. Nader, like most consumer advocates, opposes these
billing methods as a rip-off - unless they fund his own groups. One PIRG worker estimated that at Penn State
alone,
forced payments would have brought in $270,000 a year, while a voluntary checkoff would only have raised
$30,000

These forced payments brought over a million dollars a year to PIRGs even back in the mid-1970s.
(Nader's PIRG group won't release the total amount.) At least 145 colleges in 20 states were involved.

When Penn State turned down this method in favor of a box students could check to donate, the PIRG refused it.
Nader attacked the school viciously, as described above.

By many accounts, Ralph has a fear of germs that may well be hypochondriacal. When he was interviewed in July 2000 for CNN,
his main concern before the interview was "Did you wash that [earpiece]?". According to his former editor David Sanford, Nader refuses dinner invitations from
anyone with pets, because he thinks cats cause leukemia, and simply hates dogs.